Creating Open Education Resources for Environmental Sustainability

What a good environmental resource does

An open environmental lesson should help a learner understand a topic well enough to reason about it, not simply to hold a view. That means describing how a system works, what is measured, how confident scientists are, and what remains uncertain. Openly licensed materials add a further requirement: other people will adapt them, so they need to be clear enough to survive being changed.

This article is a general writing guide. It does not give advice on any specific environmental policy, product or legal obligation.

Choose a narrow, teachable question

“Climate” or “biodiversity” is too broad for a lesson. Narrower questions tend to work better:

• Where does the water in this town come from, and where does it go?
• What happens to household waste here, and what are the main options for handling it?
• Which birds, insects or plants live in the local park, and does that change across seasons?
• How does electricity reach this school, and how much does it use?

A narrow question has an answer that learners can find out, and a place where they can check. It also keeps the author from stretching beyond what they know.

Use local data and projects

Learners tend to engage more with what they can see and measure nearby. Local work also makes resources more useful to teachers elsewhere, because the method can be repeated with different data. Some options:

• Observation and counting. Species counts, tree surveys or litter surveys, recorded in a simple shared sheet, build habits of careful recording. Pair these with a clear method so counts from different groups are comparable.
• Weather and temperature records. Simple, regular readings from a school thermometer or rain gauge can introduce averages explained through real numbers, and variation. A short record cannot show climate change, since climate is defined over long periods, and the lesson should say so.
• Energy and water use. Reading meters and bills at school or home leads to unit conversion and rough comparisons.
• Public open data. Many governments and agencies publish environmental data under open terms. Where such data are available, open data can allow learners to compare their area with others, though quality and coverage vary.
• Citizen science. Some projects invite the public to submit observations. Learners can take part while also seeing why method and verification matter.

Each activity should list the equipment, safety points and time needed. Anything involving water, soil, chemicals or fieldwork should recommend adult supervision and follow the local school’s safety rules.

Keep claims proportionate

Environmental topics attract strong statements, and open material is often copied without checking. A few habits keep a resource sound:

• Cite where numbers come from. Name the type of source, such as a national statistics body or a published scientific assessment, and give the year. If you cannot verify a figure, leave it out.
• Separate what is well established from what is debated. The general scientific conclusion that human activity is warming the climate is strongly supported, for example, while the details of local effects and the best responses involve more uncertainty and legitimate disagreement about policy.
• Avoid false precision. “Roughly” and “typically” are honest words.
• Be careful with individual-action claims. Saying that one household action “saves” a given amount can be misleading, since results depend on local conditions. Present comparisons as examples, not promises.
• Avoid scare language and certainty about the future. Learners tend to be better served by explanations and choices than by alarm, and the evidence for how teaching affects attitudes is mixed.

Teaching approach

A reasonable structure for a short unit might be:

1. A question and what learners already think.
2. A brief explanation of the underlying idea.
3. A hands-on activity with local data.
4. A short discussion of what the data does and does not show.
5. A simple task that asks learners to explain their findings, including limits.

Questions that ask “what would change your mind?” help learners treat the scientific method as a process, not a list of facts. Retrieval questions at the end of a section can help recall.

Making it open and reusable

• Choose a license deliberately. A license that allows adaptation enables teachers to swap in local data and languages. Check that every image, chart and data set can be shared under your terms.
• Use plain formats. Editable documents, simple web pages and printable sheets travel better than locked files. Where connectivity is limited, include a printable or offline version.
• Write alt text and clear captions for diagrams, and avoid relying on color alone in charts.
• Mark the date and the region the material was written for, so adapters know what to update.
• Provide a short adaptation note explaining what to replace for another place.

Pitfalls

• Treating a poster or pledge as a learning outcome.
• Letting a lesson become promotion for a product or organization.
• Assuming all learners have a garden, a park or a safe place for fieldwork.
• Using old statistics because they are easy to find.
• Failing to credit data sources and photographers.

Checking whether it works

Simple measures give a modest signal: whether learners can explain the idea in their own words, whether they can read a basic chart, and whether teachers find the activity workable. Changes in behavior outside school are hard to attribute to one lesson, and a resource should not claim them.